AI in Nebraska education: Higher ed looks to human-centric approach to integrate artificial intelligence

Nebraska Public Media News is taking a look at how artificial intelligence is impacting classrooms across Nebraska, from kindergarten through higher education. This is the third story in a series that will explore several areas of AI in education, including school policies on AI, how educational institutions are implementing the technology and the safety concerns around it. Some interviews for this reporting were found in Nebraska Public Media News’ recent AI in Education survey.

The two co-directors of the University of Nebraska Artificial Intelligence Institute have very different backgrounds: one is a professor of biological and agricultural engineering and the other is a professor in English focused on digital humanities.

When they come together, they are able to share the different ways their disciplines are using AI.

“The University of Nebraska is vast,” Adrian Wisnicki, co-director of the AI institute and a professor in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said. “There are 50,000 students, 10,000 faculty and staff, and so, as much as possible, [the executive vice president and provost] wanted to, in the leadership of the institute, represent the diversity of that and create a leadership that could engage with and speak to and support that diversity.”

About 90% of students in higher education use AI occasionally in class, according to a survey from Instructure, the company that launched the education platform Canvas, and about 60% of college educators say they use AI.

With this rise of AI use in higher education, the NU system launched a task force to look at how the university should respond to the new technology. One part of that task force’s recommendations was to launch the AI Institute.

Both Wisnicki and Santosh Pitla, the other co-director of the NU AI Institute and a professor in biological and agricultural engineering at the Lincoln campus, were on the task force. Pitla said everyone is looking for answers about AI, whether they are for it, against it or neutral toward it. The institute offers a place to hold that discussion.

“The genie called AI is out of the bottle, so we’ve got to figure out how to work with it now,” Pitla said. “There are a lot of gaps in knowledge across communities, whether it's the university community or our industry partners, community colleges, or other entities.”

The two co-directors, along with the new assistant director, Jude Fogarty, have been visiting the four NU campuses along with others working in AI to see how artificial intelligence is already being used. At the Omaha campus, there’s an exhibit for people to interact with different kinds of AI.

“For example, there's a life-size avatar that can speak of Chancellor Li of the [University of Nebraska at Omaha],” Wisnicki said. “There are robots that you can interact with of various sizes, or that you can see them in action. There's also interactive exhibits that get visitors to think about the ethical dimensions of AI.”

At UNL, Pitla said the College of Engineering put on workshops with industries like Google and Nelnet with The Prairie Initiative.

“It was just like two weeks of intense AI discussions, but also hands-on workshops,” Pitla said. “These are some tangible things, hopefully, we can support and co-sponsor in the future.”

The NU Institute team has also been putting together a directory of everyone they’ve talked to. That way, they know who is working on what and can better connect people across all four campuses.

“At every campus, people are doing really interesting scholarship, research, teaching and outreach with AI,” Wisnicki said. “That’s been really interesting and heartening to see that.”

The three recognized that there are challenges with AI. All four campuses have policies against using AI to cheat or plagiarize.

“In a classroom, if students are using just AI and not using their critical thinking skills, that's a big problem,” Pitla said. “We are having a lot of discussions around that, especially from how to responsibly and ethically use AI in a classroom.”

The other big challenge is how fast AI is moving. Fogarty said how faculty are teaching or how students are completing assignments can change quickly because of artificial intelligence.

“Regardless of where an individual sits on those continuums, it does require all of us to rethink how we're approaching our work, what our real goals are for what we're doing, and how we're doing it,” Fogarty said. “That's a big lift for anybody.”

That’s a theme at many higher education institutions, including Creighton University in Omaha. George McHendry Jr., director of the Magis Core Curriculum and associate professor of communications studies, said he was surprised by how quickly Creighton was able to make changes this past year. It took nine months to change policies for the core curriculum he runs, and then a year of working on implementation. This past spring, several classes started implementing AI into coursework.

“The cat's out of the bag,” McHendry said. “We have students using it whether we want them to or not, and so it's better to have a conversation with them than everyone pretending it's not happening.”

McHendry said the college isn’t only navigating students using AI, but also the workforce starting to use it, too. He said students are sharing how internships and jobs are asking for their ability to use AI.

“When we started having some concerns about how students might be using AI, and also looking at the ways that they're using it and forecasting to what they might need to know when they graduate and — I don't know, want to get a job — we saw that as a university we had a role in addressing this kind of enormous change to both higher education and the workforce that was coming,” McHendry said. “It's part of our ethical commitment to them.”

Creighton, like many universities, doesn’t have one universal policy on AI use in classes. It’s up to each professor to decide if any AI use will be allowed, and what it may look like if it can be used.

McHendry said the ways faculty used AI during the spring semester varied. A history professor had students generate evidence of a hoax they then had to prove wrong using historical methods. Nursing faculty created an interactive video chatbot to help students practice difficult conversations with patients.

“I've seen in one of my own classes where we try and go through images and see if we think they're AI or real,” McHendry said. “Then, I use that to talk about the danger of misinformation and our ability to be misled because I really want students to be careful consumers of information.”

McHendry said while some faculty love AI and some hate it, most are somewhere in between; and student thoughts seem to follow the same trends.

“Some are really embracing it. They're excited about the potential. Others hate it and get mad when I tell them I want you to try and use it, and most students are in between,” McHendry said. “They're uncertain. They don't know how it's going to mess with their future job. They're worried about getting in trouble if they use it the wrong way. They get really annoyed by their peers who use it when they're not supposed to because they think they're taking shortcuts.”

McHendry added it’s important to help students understand what constitutes ethical AI use and what doesn’t.

That’s one pillar of how the College of Saint Mary is implementing AI on its campus. Jeff Keyte, the chief AI officer and assistant dean for graduate health and professional studies at the College of Saint Mary, developed the CLEAR framework, which stands for critical, literacy, equipped, active and responsible.

“We also needed the right thinking and the right guidelines for how we roll this out,” Keyte said. “I put together the CLEAR framework because I wanted a complete picture of, what do we need to do AI right.”

The main tool College of Saint Mary students use is called Open Web UI. Keyte said it’s similar to any other AI chatbot, but the back end of it routes into the system they pay Microsoft for rather than a public system. It’s one way the school focuses on ensuring student and faculty data is safe.

He said faculty use the AI tool to adjust their lectures to more learning styles, like seeing how their lecture fares for visual learners or those speaking English as a second language. It’s also useful for making sure professors’ lectures match their learning objectives.

“Could they do that themselves? Sure. It's a three-month project,” Keyte said. “AI can knock it out in an hour.”

Students, he said, use it for study materials. He even built a chatbot that specifically takes class PowerPoints and turns them into questions, which he said his physiology students loved. In terms of student achievement, he said it depends on the person.

“I've had students come to me and say, ‘Keyte, this is the best study tool I've ever used,’” he said. “But I also have students who are not interested in it at all and are thriving and succeeding without it. I do want folks to know that, too, that it's not everybody, but students who can use it tend to use it really well, and they're not just cheating.”

Keyte said there is a stigma around artificial intelligence, whether it be students worried about cheating or faculty that believe it’s taking their jobs.

“The first reaction for most faculty is, ‘Ew, AI shouldn't exist. It's going to destroy what we're trying to do,’” Keyte said. “I used to think they were right. I don't think they're right so much anymore.”

Keyte added that he thinks AI is going to change what they have to do, like taking a closer look at why they are asking students to do certain assignments and figuring out how to assess students on those skills in the age of AI.

A survey of the students at College of Saint Mary showed they were critical of their professors using AI, which surprised Keyte. He said students would come to the campus their freshmen year wired to think that any AI use was cheating, which he is trying to change.

The survey also showed that students wanted to know they were being evaluated by a real person, not AI. Keyte said he thinks there are ways AI can potentially help with the grading process and streamlining certain parts, but that final grade should come from a human.

That’s a common theme from many people who utilize AI. It should be human-centric, which Pitla said is the goal of the NU AI Institute.

“How do you responsibly use AI, but also [be] a trusted resource for workforce that is needed for future jobs?” Pitla said.

Fogarty said the institute wants to have input from many different stakeholders. The team of three encouraged anyone to reach out with their thoughts on AI, whether it’s positive, negative or neutral.

“When we have multiple perspectives, multiple forms of expertise, multiple frameworks of reference, we create knowledge and solutions that are better and more innovative than we would on our own,” Fogarty said.